Fantagraphics Blog Blog

{mosimage}Born in 1941 in Utica, New York as WWII broke out, Vaughn Bodé had a traumatic childhood. He first created a stir with his art in several college newspapers at Syracuse University. Professional and hardworking, Bodé blazed through the world of comics in less than a decade. His cartooning career took off in the late ’60s, as he art-directed, created animated commercials, made comic books, won a Hugo Award, and contributed to magazines such as EVO, The East Village Other, National Lampoon, Creepy, and Eerie. His series Deadbone (or Deadbone Erotica) ran in the men’s magazine Cavalier for over 200…

{product_snapshot:id=568,true,false,false,left}Ted Stearn was born in Massachussets in 1961 as a small baby, but soon grew up to be a very short child. He loved to draw, so when he grew a little more he decided that he wanted to be an artist. In 1979 he went to Rhode Island School of Design and majored in painting. His senior year he spent in Rome, Italy, where he was blown away by seeing the real thing, instead of all those fuzzy slides in art history class. He was also blown away by the fact that he was losing his hair already. After…

{product_snapshot:id=1515,true,false,false,left}Beasts! is a classic mythological menagerie, comprised only of creatures that were thought at one time to actually exist, depicted by about a hundred of the most acclaimed artists and cartoonists coming from the most avant-garde ambits of the art world. The Beasts project has fired the imaginations of luminaries such as Craig Thompson, Souther Salazar, Jeff Soto, Glenn Barr, Dave Cooper, Tim Biskup, Seonna Hong, Jeremy Fish and Jay Ryan, who present never-before-seen art completely original to this book, superbly laid out in breathtaking, full-color two-page spreads. Beasts! collects many of the best visual artists from the worlds of…

Originally published in The Comics Journal #164, November 1993 {mosimage}I was first introduced to Jim Woodring by Gil Kane in 1986. At the time, Jim was a storyboard artist at the animation studio Ruby-Spears, where he worked with Gil. Gil, who can be a relentless proponent of discoveries, insisted that I meet Jim, whom he told me was a great artist as well as a great human being. Against my own better judgment — why would a great artist, much less a great human being, work for a second-rate animation studio, I wondered — I got together with Jim and…

Originally published in The Comics Journal #159, 1993 {mosimage}Two days after his 35th birthday, Carole Sobocinski interviewed Peter Bagge. SOBOCINSKI: So the age of 35 is generally considered to be a midpoint in life where we reach a lot of crucial decisions about who we are and where we’re going. With that in mind, have you noticed any changes in terms of your outlook in life, your approach to life? Are you satisfied with where you are, where you’re going? BAGGE: Yes, to the latter. As far as changing outlooks on life in general, it seems to me that as…

{mosimage} It was early 1955. The New York record producer, Arthur Shimkin, for whom I’d done a couple of animated musical shorts when I was directing the UPA/New York animation studio, heard of my developing newspaper strip and asked me to come up with a script for a musical production of it for a Simon & Shuster “Little Golden Record,” one of those little 6-inch yellow plastic discs made for kiddie record players. Not a big deal, yet Shimkin brought in truly top talent for the date. He got the pop American composer Alec Wilder, and Broadway lyricist Marshall Barer…

{mosimage}Jim Woodring’s cartoons chart a course through some of the most surreal imagery ever seen in any artistic medium, drawing visions from the realms of the subconscious to create a graphic world of dreams. But while his work may speak in the language of dreams, Woodring’s life has often led him into nightmare territory. As a child, Woodring was plagued by both schoolmates and by waking nightmares accompanied by “voices” — a condition which would haunt him through childhood and much of his adult life. After enduring drug and alcohol abuse and homelessness, he worked as an animator for several…

In the late 20th and 21st century diverse forms of commonplace and popular art appeared to be coalescing into a formidable faction of new painted realism. The phenomenon owed its genesis to a number of factors. The new school of imagery was a product of art that didn’t fit comfortable into the accepted definition of fine art. It embraced some of the figurative graphics that formal art academia tended to reject: comic books, movie posters, trading cards, surfer art, hot rod illustration, to mention a few. This alternative art movement found its most congealing participant in one of America’s most…

{mosimage}Lewis Trondheim was born in 1964 and spent his childhood in the french town of Fontainebleau. In 1987 he met Jean-Christophe Menu, an aspiring cartoonist who turned him on to the world of comics. In 1990, together with four other cartoonists, Menu and Trondheim co-founded L’Association, a publishing company which would go on to publish some of the most revolutionary alternative European comics of the decade. Trondheim has appropriated the classic funny-animal tradition of cartoonists like Carl Barks, Walt Kelly, and Stan Sakai and given it a fresh contemporary spin with his “McConey” stories. The dialogue is consistently witty, and…

{mosimage}Born in 1962, London, Carol Swain was brought up in Wales, the population of the village being an uneasy mix of mean Baptist hysteric (© Hunter S Thompson) and drop-out hippie. A place deemed so evil by travelling evangelist missionaries, they condemned it as a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. She left Sodom and Gomorrah to go to art school where she studied painting. In 1989 she began self-publishing her comic Way Out Strips, which was later picked up by Fantagraphics Books. Since then she has completed two graphic novels and has contributed numerous comics stories to anthologies worldwide. She lives…